3/52 - Grand Marnier

A Bottle of Grand Marnier 

This shot of a bottle of Grand Marnier (Orange and Cognac liqueur) has probably been the most challenging shot, from a lighting point of view, that I've captured to date. I got the idea for this image after seeing a photograph of a bottle of Hennessy taken by Atton Conrad. Since I had only 2 lights to work with, I had to capture 5 separate images and merge them during post processing.

For those of you who are interested in the lighting, read on.
Unfortunately I didn't capture any of the setup shots as there were too many! Instead I'll describe the lighting I've used for each of the shots and upload the individual images.

Shot 1 - Contents of the bottle and the label

Shot 1 - Contents of the bottle and the label

The Grand Marnier bottle is dark brown in colour. In order to light the contents of the bottle, I placed a Canon 430 EX II directly behind it and fired it towards the camera at 1/2 power. To light the label, I used a snooted Canon 430 EX II fired from camera left at 1/16th. The snooted strobe was gelled with a 1/2 CTO. In order to control the light I played around with the aperture and finally settled on f18.0. I could have got the same effect by controlling the output of the flashes but it was easier to change the aperture instead.

Shot 2 - Defining the left edge of the bottle

Shot 2 - Defining the left edge of the bottle

The effect of this shot is subtle in the final image. To light just the edge of the bottle I fired a Canon 430 EX II zoomed to 105 mm through two sheets of white foam core board. The space between the foam core boards narrowed down to about a 1cm gap. This controlled the spill and only defined the edge of the bottle. the strobe was not gelled for this shot.

Shot 3 - Defining the right edge of the bottle

Shot 3 - Defining the right edge of the bottle

The setup for this shot was identical to the shot above but on the right hand side of the camera.

Shot 4 - Background

Shot 4 - Background

I wanted to light the background of the image a little to give it some depth. I placed a candle just behind the bottle and had the shutter opened for 5 seconds at f4.0 to capture the image above. The light from the candle was soft and warm and I felt it suited this shot.

Shot 5 - Light Painting

Shot 5 - Light Painting

This shot was the hardest to capture. I used a clear glass lined with an Orange and Red gel, filled with clear marbles and a tea light as the light source. The glass was also wrapped with dark tape to allow only a section of it to be exposed to the camera. I had the shutter opened for 3.2 seconds at f4.0. During the exposure I moved the glass around until I captured a light trail I was happy with. This took a while as it was not easy to create a decent light trail.

The image above is a composite of these 5 images.